Steam OS

[Benzh95]

ok i am doing so wishful thinking. what if steam made an OS? it would run dual boot with windows and use the windows drivers, but it would be optimized for games. the great thing is almost nothing needs to b changed on steam. simply have the OS boot directly to the steam store. just add a control panel to mess with video card settings and pug and play devices. a "switch to windows" button would be nice 2. it has a web browser so no change needed there.

what do u guys think? how much better would games run on an OS made for gaming and nothing else? what if we could strip down win7 to make something like this? get all unnecessary processes out of there and make it boot to steam. lets talk about it people.

 

[13thmonkey]

probably not a lot better, 1-5%, and for any other use it'd be rubbish, for most people the PC is a multiuse machine. Not an expensive console.

 

[Benzh95]

that is y it would dual boot with windows and b windows dependent. it seems to me that it would do more than 1-5% but idk. what do others think?

 

[mathew7]

Dual booting is not really helful. I tried for years dual-booting windows+linux and always ended up doing everything in Windows; because when I wanted to play, I had to kill everything and reboot. Now I'm virtualizing, but that's a whole different story and not for the faint of heart (or non-advanced techies). And now I can keep windows just for games, and do everything else under linux (like writing this reply). You know, like many guys who have a console and a PC!

 

[DM186]

Then that would allow Steam to controll what we want and what games we could do. If we went out and bought a game and tried to down load it Steam would not let you because we are using them as OS. I would say not a good Idea.

 

[Benzh95]

Then that would allow Steam to controll what we want and what games we could do. If we went out and bought a game and tried to down load it Steam would not let you because we are using them as OS. I would say not a good Idea.

thats a good point. you still could play it in you windows boot tho.

 

[AntiZig]

I'm very interested to know how a separate OS would use windows drivers

 

[jwk3]

thats a good point. you still could play it in you windows boot tho.

If that's the case then I wouldn't consider having a Steam OS, I would want it to do EVERYTHING gaming wise.

I would also have the problem that steam doesn't like non-steam games, you can't track hours of any non-steam game like you can with Xfire and is generally not very co-operative with outsider games.

 

[perlwonk]

Yes, I think a vendor neutral OS that's optomized for Steam is an awesome idea. You couldn't strip down windows 7 unless you could get windows 7 source code, which isn't likely. And Windows isn't exactly vendor neutral anyway. Now that Steam is being ported to Linux, an ideal solution would be to fork Ubuntu (...Steambuntu?) and optimize if for Steam. In fact, once the Steam port for linux is complete, I'd be really surprised if this doesn't happen anyway. I can't imagine I'm only person who's though of this. Someone's probably already working on it.

 

[simon12]

It would have to be Linux based as MS would not let them mess with Windows and steam is coming to linux so its not impossible.